CALL FOR PROPOSALS: FEMINIST FOOD STUDIES

Food studies emerged in the mid 1990s (Nestle & McIntosh, 2010) as a critical, interdisciplinary field to examine our increasingly complex relationships to food, and feminist food research has played a significant role in its development (Koç, Sumner & Winson, 2012). In two decades, feminist food scholarship has grown steadily, yet arguably not led to an identifiable, coherent body of work or area of study known as “feminist food studies.” —This is despite the increasing institutionalization of food studies in North America and the demonstrable insights that a feminist lens brings to analyses of food, food work, eating, feeding, and the body (Brady, Gingras, and Power, 2010; Cairns & Johnston, 2015; Brady, Szabo, Power, and Gingras, forthcoming)

This themed issue of CFS/RCÉA aims to highlight the spectrum of current scholarship in the emergent area of feminist food studies. We are interested in questions such as: How might feminist theory and feminist analyses of food systems, food practices, and gender enhance, enliven, and develop food studies? How do feminist food studies scholars differ in their pedagogical, methodological, and epistemological approaches? What work has already been accomplished by feminist food scholars? What disciplines inform or are missing from this activity? What areas have yet to be addressed? What future directions might feminist food studies follow?

We are seeking a wide range of papers that employ a feminist lens or analysis to explore food and gender in all its complexity. Please note that submissions can be made under a variety of categories, described under the “Submissions” menu at www.canadianfoodstudies.ca. These categories include commentaries, perspective articles, original research articles, review articles, field reports, digital works, and art or design works.

To meet the journal criteria, articles must contain Canadian content and/or have a Canadian first author.

Areas for submission include but are not limited to the following:

● Intersectionality as a theoretical and/or methodological approach
● Race, ethnicity, gender, social class, age, sex, disabilities
● Feminist method/ologies
● Feminist pedagogies
● Femininities / masculinities
● Embodiment including submissions on fat(ness), health as an embodied social practice, food and eating
● Ecofeminist perspectives and critical animal studies
● Indigenous foodways and perspectives
● Material feminism
● Food systems
● Food security and food sovereignty
● Women and agriculture / farming

Please submit abstracts to: feministfoodstudies@gmail.com

Abstract submission deadline: October 31, 2016

Final submission deadline: March 31, 2017

Note that for accepted abstracts, manuscripts must be submitted directly to the journal.

Jennifer Brady, PhD (c), RD, is a PhD candidate in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen’s University. Her doctoral work examines the concomitant shift in knowledge base and social justice commitments that accompanied dietetics’ split from home economics. Her work appears in Critical Public Health, Food and Foodways, Journal of Critical Dietetics, and Fat Studies. She is the coeditor of the forthcoming volume, Conversations in Food Studies (University of Manitoba Press).

Barbara Parker, PhD, teaches gender, food & health, food & culture, gender in contemporary society, fat studies, and qualitative methods at Lakehead University, where she is assistant professor in sociology. She is currently engaged in research that examines women’s food practices, indigenous and gendered experiences of food insecurity, and food bank usage in the post-secondary context.

Elaine Power, PhD is associate professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Studies at Queen’s University, where she teaches social determinants of health, fat studies, and qualitative research methods. She is the co-author of Acquired Tastes: Why Families Eat the Way They Do (UBC Press) and co-editor of the forthcoming volume, Neoliberal Governance and Health: Duties, Risks and Vulnerabilities (McGill-Queen’s University Press).

Susan Belyea is a PhD candidate in the School of Kinesiology and Health Studies at Queen's University. Her doctoral research examines the everyday experience of food insecurity in different policy environments in Canada and Latin America. Her academic work is informed by her long-time activism in food justice and anti-poverty movements.